Reports, arguments, and essays from the artists and staff of Chicago’s Court Theatre

Blah blah blah–see you tomorrow!

Today’s rehearsal just ended–the cast was staging and then working through Act V, the play’s manic, creepy, hilarious climax. The actors, to my eye, seem a bit desperate, a bit terrified of the whirlpool Ibsen’s created; they’re holding on for dear life. The staging moved very quickly–Charlie has a a clearer and more complete list of specific images he wants to see than I’ve ever known him to bring into initial blocking. This is actually not that comforting to actors in the process of creating behavior for characters in extreme emotional distress. Today, the cast mostly expressed a desire to slow down and work through the logic, and sometimes they got pretty frustrated.

From what Charlie’s told me about his intentions for this process, that’s precisely where he wants them. As ever, he’s reluctant to hand out moment-by-moment logic, always preferring to help the cast to find it themselves. This usually leads to satisfyingly surprising individual stories. But on this one he’s taken that notion quite far, attempting to zoom past knots of confusing cause-and-effect, leaping from picture to picture, trusting that there will be future rehearsal hours to clarify and redefine the moments.

This goes back to something he said at First Rehearsal, past the point where my last entry ended. I intended to give you another semi-verbatim chunk of his remarks, but after observing today’s rehearsal, I think it’s more useful to contextualize it in today’s work instead. What he told the cast was, “Unlike [for instance] Titus Andronicus, where the process was about figuring out what the hell that story is and how best to tell it, I know exactly what The Wild Duck is. I’ve worked on it, I’ve seen it done exquisitely. So for me, unlike any other rehearsal process I’ve directed, I’m going to be starting with very clear ideas. And I need you to push me to take it to the next place. The last thing I want is to just do a warmed-over version of Lucian’s production. This is ours, and we need to be rigorous about challenging the first idea.”

So what he’s doing now, I think, is laying out that first draft, putting all his favorite Lucian images and his already-congealed understanding of the story on the table, for the cast and himself to then take up, shake, break open, rebuild, discard, replace.

This play is difficult. The laughable absurdity of the situation is horribly tinged with the pathetic, human scrambling of the characters. Empathy and revulsion form a wholly new sort of audience-actor relation as their notes are plucked together. Today, it was exhausting to watch, even for half an hour, the actors running around holding up lines and stories and props and jackknife emotional transitions like plates on sticks. I suspect that when it’s up, it’ll still be exhausting to watch, but for much more satisfying reasons.